Dead Cross gets super intense on debut album

When members of Retox and The Locust first announced they were teaming up with former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo to form a thrashy new hardcore band called Dead Cross, every indication suggested the band would be pretty intense. You don’t put together musicians in some of the loudest, fastest and heaviest bands in North America without expecting the project to end up being totally nutso. But when vocalist Gabe Serbian ultimately decided to step away from the band to spend more time with his family, things got even more insane: Mike Patton, legendary vocalist of bands such as Faith No More, Mr. Bungle and Fantomas, stepped in to fill the void with his own mutant screech.

The band’s self-titled full-length debut is pretty much exactly what an album featuring Patton, Lombardo, Justin Pearson and Mike Crain should sound like. It’s a blistering, brutal, 27-minute hardcore juggernaut that never relents. The only real moment of pause on the whole thing is the sound of a dial-up modem at the beginning of opening track “Seizure and Desist,” which soon enough explodes into pummeling thrash session that will likely leave the listener feeling like a slab of tenderized meat.

It really only gets more insane from there. “Idiopathic” moves at a pace that would seem impossible for human hands to play, while Patton’s erratic bark of the title of “Shillelagh” is more abrasive than any guitar sound that Crain manages to come up with. And that’s saying a lot; this is an album that’s not intended to soothe or go down easy. Dead Cross are all aggression, all agitation, all the time.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of accessibility, however. The power-chord-driven “The Future Has Been Cancelled” roars like vintage Slayer, while “Gag Reflex” finds the band slowing their tempo and stretching out over a surprisingly epic and psychedelic four minutes (which, for Dead Cross, is a marathon). There’s also one other unexpected treat: a buzzing, gnarly cover of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” that trims about seven minutes off of the original. But when your M.O. is making the maximum amount of noise in the shortest amount of time, there’s no point in dragging anything out any longer than necessary.